Something Like Frankenstein's Monster
A Continuing Clash Of Beliefs Will Never Bring Life To The Fragments
The caged bird sings with a fearful trill,
of things unknown, but longed for still,
and his tune is heard on the distant hill,
for the caged bird sings of freedom.
― Maya Angelou
“When beliefs clash, everyone needs to take a step back and consider the other position,” I wrote last week. Today, I woke to an article in the Free Press, “The Day The Delusions Died”. Konstantin Kisin makes the argument that “[W]e have indulged in magical thinking for too long, choosing comforting myths over harsh realities. About terrorism. About immigration. And about a host of other issues. In our hunger for progress, we have forgotten that not all change is for the better. Now the world is paying the price for that self-indulgence.”
Hamas’s barbarism — and the explanations and celebrations throughout the West that followed their orgy of violence — have forced an overnight exodus from the “unconstrained” camp into the “constrained” one.
Kisin explains the terms: Those with “unconstrained vision” (progressives) believe that social ills and evils can be overcome through collective action that encourages humans to behave better; that poverty, crime, inequality, and war are not inevitable, but are puzzles to be solved. Those with “constrained vision” (conservatives) believe that human nature is a universal constant and that no amount of social engineering can change human self-interest; most political and social problems will never be “solved”; they can only be managed.
He believes that the street protests in cities across the West, “condemning Israel even before any major Israeli response to the attacks,” and including crowds brandishing swastikas and chanting “gas the Jews” while Black Lives Matter chapters lionized terrorists, awakened the “woke” and “shattered the illusion that wokeness is about protecting victims and standing up for persecuted minorities.”
There has been a similar shift on immigration. An immigrant himself, Kisin writes that, from the late 1990s onward, immigration policy morphed from being seen as a solution to specific problems to being “a moral good in its own right”.
“When I moved to Britain from Russia in 1996, net immigration into Britain ran at 55,000 people a year,” he wrote. “Last year, net immigration stood at over 600,000 people.”
Kisin blames illegal immigration for pro-Hamas rallies around the world, but he says “the issue of illegal immigration has been impossible to discuss in polite company for decades. No matter how bad the problem became, to raise concerns about it would almost always lead to accusations of bigotry and xenophobia. … It is clearer now than ever before that borders aren’t about bigotry, they’re about security. In a sign of the times, Joe Biden is now continuing work on the border wall that Democrats spent years criticizing Donald Trump for erecting.”
When you let your institutions be captured by an ideology of intolerance and illiberalism masquerading as progress, that has consequences. When you sow division at home and signal weakness abroad, that has consequences. When you debase the public’s faith in what they are told by the media and their government, that has consequences too.
At the heart of his argument is a rejection of the progressive view that “We need only to say the right things, enact the right policies, and spend enough money, and we will suffer these social ills no more.” Instead, “[I]f there is any constant in human history, it is that revolutionaries always feel entitled to destroy those who stand in their way.”
Kisin brings up some great points about the willingness of “university presidents who were quick to issue statements condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the killing of George Floyd [to] fall silent, or offer the most slippery, equivocal statements carefully crafted to avoid offending anti-Israel groups. They watched an Israeli at Columbia get beaten with a stick, and heard reports about the physical intimidation of students on campuses across the country. They read about dozens of student organizations at Harvard signing a letter holding Israel “entirely responsible” for the massacre of Israelis.”
What Kisin fails to admit, for it would weaken his arguments in support of the “constrained” view, is that progressives are not the only ones who “feel entitled to destroy those who stand in their way”. The MAGA Republicans, created by the reality-TV president, no longer believe that the purpose of a caucus is to allow members to meet behind closed doors, select a candidate, and then emerge as a unified voting bloc.
Robert Hubbell writes, “[T]he inability of Republicans to elect a Speaker is a direct consequence of their election denialism — the ‘It only counts if I win’ mentality. … [W]hen 140 election deniers in the Republican majority were called upon to elect a Speaker, [t]he notable absence of unity in the GOP caucus led to fifteen rounds of voting for Kevin McCarthy. Over the last three weeks, internal GOP caucus votes nominating a candidate for Speaker have been routinely ignored by various factions within the caucus. Rather than supporting the winners of their internal caucus votes, House Republicans have simply refused to recognize the results of their own elections— a trick that Trump taught them in 2020.” He continued,
House Republicans have used threats of violence as an election tactic in the Speaker’s race. Opponents of Jim Jordan were swamped with threats of violence by Jordan supporters. … Republicans normalized threats of violence against their Democratic opponents in 2016 and thereafter. Some dismissed the violent insurrectionists who attacked US Capitol as “peaceful tourists.” They have now turned their learned behavior of threats of violence against one another. It is a tactic that will be difficult to unlearn.
The reality is that both extremist progressives and extremist conservatives are willing to ignore facts they do not like, promoting censorship, ignoring historical facts that do match their ideologies, and vilifying individuals that will not go along. They are choosing facts that they like and suppressing facts they do not like. That approach will not end well.
Right now, America is a bit like Frankenstein’s monster lying on its slab, pieced together from mismatched body parts. The United States was established as a place where all would come together for the common good, but the common good no longer motivates the majority of its political and institutional leaders. They have let their prejudices get in the way of unity and, for many, it has become only about power.
Until we recognize what we have in common, rather than focusing on our differences (and relegating people to categories such as “progressive” and “conservative”), our nation and our world will continue to pay the price. We need to tone down the hate and focus on our common humanity.
Yes, the Hamas attack has forced people to reconsider their outlooks, but it should not simply push them to the other extreme. That is not a solution.
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